Love and Grief During the Riots and War

By C.M. Hope

This novel, Love and Grief, narrates the effect that the harsh and oppressive social and economic conditions of the 1920s and 1930s had on the working class in Barbados. It details the events which led the workers to riot to show how aggrieved they had become by the conditions they had to endure. The novel emphasizes how the conditions strained relationships in a fictional family i.e. The Wards. Mr. Ward made a remark that indiscreetly questioned the dispensing of justice to a rioter. Because of his indiscretion, he had to leave the island to find employment on one of the Lady Boats that carried cargo and passengers between Canada and the British West Indian islands. The outbreak of the Second World War found him on the high seas in one of the boats which the German U-Boats eventually torpedoed and in which he perished.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 4, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450044448

C.M. Hope

C.M. Hope wrote his first short story “The Excursion” in 1948 a year after he left school. “Bim” published the story in its Vol. 3, No. 9, 26-29. Two years later the journal published his second story “The Green Vase” Vol. 3, No. 17, 306-312. The B.B.C. read both stories in its “Caribbean Calling” series. Subsequently “Caribbean Quarterly” published his third short story: “Gabrielle” in its Vol 15 issue 2 & 3. “Love and Grief” is the first longer work he has had published.

Book preview

Love and Grief

during

the Riots and the War

A Novel

C.M. Hope

Copyright © 2010 by C.M. Hope.

Library of Congress Control Number:          2010902095

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-4500-4443-1

                            Softcover                          978-1-4500-4442-4

                            Ebook                              978-1-4500-4444-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover from the sketches of Isabella Hope-Fischer

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

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Contents

 LOVE AND GRIEF

CHAPTER 1

 RELATIONSHIPS

CHAPTER 2

 RIOTS

CHAPTER 3

 SCHOOL AND FLIGHT

CHAPTER 4

 MORE TROUBLE

CHAPTER 5

 A BROKEN HOME

CHAPTER 6

 THE RETURN

CHAPTER 7

 WAR AND DEATH

 EPILOGUE

 Biographical Note

In the memory of Cham and Olive Hope

LOVE AND GRIEF

CHAPTER 1

RELATIONSHIPS

Jean Ward, plump, with her ripe golden apple complexion, complaisant and soft-spoken except when she concluded that someone acted in a way which would cause harm to any one of her three children, Johnothon, Susan and baby Rosemary. So she pleaded with Johnothon’s father, Nathan Ward, depending on her mood, the circumstances or the person with whom she spoke, she addressed her husband either as: ‘Nat’, ‘Nathan Ward’ or ‘Mr. Ward’.

Nathan Ward, she said in a voice high with displeasure, the boy will still be five when school start next year and you going let him go all the way down to Bay Street this morning wit the rioting and shooting that going on.

The rioting over. For now, her husband assured her.

Over? Over? For now? she asked with heat. You forget the police nearly shoot you in Pine Road?

Who told you that?, he asked.

It’s you that say they point the guns at you when you pass by George Street, she reminded him.

Concern about her husband’s safety and joy over seeing her first son leave for his first day in school combined to provoke her emotional outburst.

Nathan Ward said nothing more to his wife. He preferred to take her mother’s, Mrs. Sealy’s advice. Mrs. Eulalee Sealy, whom all the patrons of The Nature Rest the hotel and bar she owned at the corner of Beckwith Street and Bay Street called Miss Lee had warned him:

When she getin on like dat, doan say nuthin to she. She ain’t going listen.

So Nathan helped Johnothon button his new khaki shirt and the fly of his pants and tie the laces to his new, size five, brown leather shoes which his grandmother had taken him to T.R. Evans to buy. After that Ward told his son to go and say ‘goodbye’ to his mother who had retreated into the bedroom of their house to weep as if she would never see her son again.

Nathan Ward avoided making trouble or associating himself with any kind of disorder. His quiet but nervy appearance had attracted Jean from the moment she had seen him waiting for his father in the dining area of the The Nature Rest. After that she told her mother that something inside her made her feel he should become the father of her children. She turned that feeling into reality during the nights in October when Nathan had no other option but to sleep in the hotel because the heavy rain prevented him and his father Nathaniel from traveling to their home in St. Lucy during the evenings. During one of those nights Jean crept into Nathan’s cot and flooded him with passion.

Six weeks later Mrs. Sealy had prepared cou cou in a flying fish sauce for Nathan’s father lunch. Mr. Ward had chosen The Nature Rest as the lodging where he could eat and sometimes sleep when he had to work late, or when too much rain fell and prevented him from catching his bus, in preference to the two hotels on Probyn Street.

The boisterous men who came off the boats and ships after they tied up in the inner basin of Carlisle careenage, brought their custom and the perfumed and painted obstreperous women who followed them to the Probyn Street hotels. They offended Mr. Ward’s sense of godliness. Mr. Ward could walk from his work place on the Barbados Train Service to the Probyn Street hotels in five minutes; it took him a fifteen minutes sweat to reach The Nature Rest. He felt, however, that the calm of The Nature Rest compensated for the effort he had to make. Additionally he felt attracted to Mrs. Sealy’s comeliness, a description which he thought suited her physical appearance and which expressed his lustful feeling, without making him sin. Indeed he often thought he should seek to bring her to the Lord. Mr. Ward hesitated not because of moral or religious concerns but because Mr. Sealy’s bulging shoulders and enormous hands made him reconsider any such intention.

Mr. Ward also noted the tall, slim, brown skin girl with straight hair who appeared whenever his son Nathan accompanied him. Mrs. Sealy called the girl Jean and she addressed Mr. Sealy as Daddy. Mr. Ward wondered how two persons with complexions as dark as Mr. and Mrs. Sealy could have produced an offspring with Jean’s characteristics. He did not try to find out about Mr. Sealy’s past although the gold fillings in his teeth, the gold bracelets he wore, and his foreign accent indicated that he had lived in a country other than Barbados for a long period of time.

As for Mrs. Sealy, Mr. Ward had noted that Jean, her daughter, resembled the girls whom the major white plantation owner in his parish had fathered from his negro field hands whom he found pleasing. So Mr. Ward asked Mrs. Sealy whether she came from St. Lucy? Mrs. Sealy responded:

"No! Uh bawn in St. Andrew’.

Mrs. Sealy did not relate that her mother Evangeline Branch, whom everybody called Vangie had given birth to her, the tenth child of the twelve children she bore, in the Chalky Mount area and named her Sissie. When Sissie reached the age of six her mother brought her into Tudor Street to Mrs. Boxill’s Cook Shop with the cassava and sweet potatoes she reaped from her plot of land which measured less than quarter of an acre. Mrs. Boxill paid Vangie six cents for the ground provisions and offered her an additional ten cents to let her keep and bring up the dark skin, bright eye Sissie. Vangie agreed with Mrs. Boxill adoption proposal and she told Sissie before she went off, she must always obey and respect her grannie.

Six months later Vangie died. Her neighbours reported: She drop down dead jes like dat, planting slips in de hot sun. De flu kill she, they asserted.

Mrs. Boxill had ‘adopted’ two other girls with the names of Doreen and Joycie and Sissie joined them in the domestic service—sweeping and scrubbing the floors and tables of the Cook Shop and cleaning the dishes, the pots and pans in the kitchen. Sissie grew taller and became more physically developed than her two companions, so after her twelfth birthday Mrs. Boxill let her serve the customers who ate their meals in the Cook Shop’s dining area.

One customer insisted that only Sissie should serve him on the rare occasion when he turned up in the Cook Shop. Sissie however feared the tall, heavily built black man who with a loud voice announced himself as Gordon Sealy. Gordon Sealy always wore a three piece grey suit, a cravat, black boots with spats and around his stomach a gold chain to which he attached a watch. His appearance, especially his bridge of gold teeth terrified Sissie.

Mrs. Boxill had told her that Mr. Gordon Sealy came from Demerara with the plantains, pineapples and wallaba wood. Sissie placed Demerara in Africa where she heard the people had big mouths and big teeth with which they killed, cooked and ate each other. So fearful Sissie became of Mr. Sealy that she begged Mrs. Boxill not to make her serve him. Mrs. Boxill acceded to Sissie’s request. She recognized that Mr. Sealy had become too fond of Sissie and he might try to disengage her from the establishment so she changed Sissie’s tasks.

Before Sissie made her request Mrs. Boxill had everyday sent George, the man who did the heavy lifting and the repairs in the Cook Shop, to the offices of the white gentlemen and the important coloured men who worked in Bridgetown, with baskets in which she